Hi Connor, as the following article states, in addition to the extended duration of oil production, there are also significant risks to pipelines that would send the captured CO2 back into the ground. Bold Nebraska:
If a carbon pipeline ruptures or leaks, it will produce an explosive plume of colorless, odorless carbon dioxide gas, which is an asphyxiant that will suffocate all living things, prevent combustion vehicles such as cars from starting, and prevent escape to safety.
This happened in Satartia, Mississippi in 2020. For more details, Huffington Post:
It was just after 7 p.m. when residents of Satartia, Mississippi, began to notice a rotten egg-like smell before a greenish cloud rolled across Highway 433 and spread into the valley surrounding the small town. Within minutes, people were inside the cloud, gasping for breath, nauseous and passing out.
Within minutes, about two dozen people collapsed in their homes, at a nearby fishing camp along the Yazoo River, and in their cars, causing a catastrophe. Cars’ engines shut down because they need oxygen to burn fuel. Drivers scrambled to get out of their stuck vehicles, but became disoriented and were forced to wander through the darkness.
The initial call to Yazoo County Emergency Management came in at 7:13 p.m. on Feb. 22, 2020.
“Caller reports a foul odor and green mist on the highway,” a message was sent by dispatchers two minutes later to the cellphones and radios of all county emergency responders.
Emergency personnel were dispatched almost immediately, although they still didn’t know exactly what the emergency was: a leak in one of the nearby natural gas pipelines, or perhaps a chlorine leak from a water tank.
But the first thing that came to mind was not the carbon dioxide pipeline that runs through the hills above the town, less than a half mile away. Denbury, then known as Denbury Resources, Communication network CO2 pipelines in the Gulf Coast region are used to inject gas into oil fields to extract oil. Atmospheric CO2 is odorless, colorless and heavier than air, but the industrial CO2 in the Denbury pipeline is compressed into a liquid and pumped through the pipeline under high pressure. rupture In such pipelines, CO2 Erupt A dense, powdery white cloud sinks to the ground, making steel brittle and cold enough to be smashed with a sledgehammer.
by Jeff DembickiShe is a New York City-based investigative climate journalist and author of The Petroleum Papers and Are We Screwed? Smog Removal.
A major oil field in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan probably reached the end of its life eight years ago, but it could keep producing 1.5 million barrels of oil a year until 2100, thanks to carbon capture and storage technology that has been widely touted by the oil and gas industry and some political leaders as a key solution to climate change.
That’s according to calculations by Mengwei Zhao, a Calgary-based senior geological consultant who wrote a paper about his findings in the February 2024 issue of AAPG Bulletin, a journal published by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.
Since the 1970s, oil and gas producers have been capturing carbon dioxide from their operations and injecting it into depleted wells, a process known as enhanced oil recovery, but “there is little research documenting in detail how carbon dioxide injection affects oil production and extends the life of oil fields,” Zhao wrote.
He analyzed more than 22 years of production data from the Weyburn-Midale field, which has been receiving carbon dioxide injection since 2000 – the world’s longest-running enhanced oil recovery project using carbon capture and storage. “Without carbon dioxide injection, the field would have reached the end of its life by 2016,” Zhao concluded, but noted that enhanced oil recovery could extend the field’s life to 39 years, or even 84 years.
This is very worrying news for the climate, according to David Schlissel of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a nonprofit research institute focused on the clean energy transition. “The fact that these wells were supposed to be retired and now could potentially operate beyond 2100 is astonishing and frightening,” he told DeSmog.
Zhao said that while he focused on a specific project in Canada, he expects to see “similar results” in larger carbon capture and storage projects around the world — extending oil production for decades in depleted fields (which Zhao calls “pools”) that would otherwise have to be shut down.
Brazilian oil giant Petrobras Record inserted In 2022, 10.6 million tonnes of CO2 will be stored underground and used to extract oil. Saudi Arabia Have ambitious plans The aim is to improve oil recovery. U.S. companies like Occidental Continue to expand technology in oil-producing regions such as the Permian Basin.
“Every oil field has different geology and quality,” Zhao told DeSmog about the technology’s global prospects, “so they may respond differently to CO2 injection, but overall it will certainly benefit oil production.” He writes that this benefits both the industry and the climate, as most of the injected CO2 would be permanently stored in old oil fields.
But there is much debate on this point among climate and energy experts. Desmog Survey It found that of 12 large-scale carbon capture projects around the world, “carbon capture targets were repeatedly missed” because companies did not properly bury greenhouse gases underground, or in some cases simply released them into the atmosphere.
Write about Enhanced Oil Recovery Earlier this year“Every new barrel of oil and every cubic foot of gas sold and burned releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,” said Naomi Oreskes, a professor at Harvard University. “So not only are these projects useless, they’re perpetuating the use of fossil fuels at a critical time in history when we need to be doing the exact opposite.”
Huge public subsidies
The AAPG Bulletin investigation was conducted by the Canadian and Alberta governments. Get Ready to Give The British government will grant more than $15.3 billion in tax credits to the country’s largest oil sands producer to build carbon capture and storage projects. Meanwhile, it has pledged £20 billion. Subsidies and U.S. Oil and Gas Producers You can get a tax deduction An $85 deduction for each tonne of carbon dioxide deposited in underground formations (if the carbon dioxide is used for enhanced oil recovery, the deduction is reduced to $60 per tonne).
Ostensibly, these huge public subsidies are intended to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. The Biden administration argues “Large-scale deployment of carbon capture and storage technologies is crucial to addressing the climate crisis.”
However, most of the carbon dioxide buried by the oil and gas industry is currently used to extract oil. Reported last yearOf the 32 commercial carbon capture facilities worldwide, 22 are using captured CO2 to extend the life of aging oil wells.
The potential for enhanced oil recovery using captured carbon dioxide is enormous: “Of the 600 billion total barrels of discovered oil in the United States, approximately 400 billion barrels cannot be recovered by conventional methods. Half of the unrecoverable oil (200 billion barrels) is at suitable depths where (enhanced oil recovery) can be applied,” according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Estimated.
“Produce oil and gas forever.”
Oil and gas producers argue that even if carbon capture is used in oil production, it is beneficial for the climate because the buried carbon neutralizes the climate impacts of burning new oil. With such technology, “there’s no reason not to produce oil and gas forever,” says Vicki Holub, CEO of the US company Occidental Petroleum. He told NPR last year.
That argument is based on very flawed mathematics, Schlissel counters. Point to According to U.S. government calculations, injecting one tonne of carbon dioxide into an aging well can produce up to three barrels of oil. Burning those three barrels would release about 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. “That wipes out the savings that we could have made by capturing the carbon dioxide,” he said.
The net effect will be to prolong our dependence on oil and gas. When the Weyburn Carbon Capture Project in Saskatchewan was first announced in 1997, Promoted As a way to extend the life of aging oil fields by 25 years, It was then advertised As a “transitional technology that will enable the world to meet the challenges of climate change.”
More than a quarter century later, the Weyburn oil field is “still going strong.” according to “There’s still a billion barrels of oil left in the reservoir,” one expert told an industry publication in 2022.
According to calculations that Zhao recently published in the Proceedings of the American Energy Agency, this project and many like it could keep producing oil well past the 2050 deadline that scientists say is needed to reach net-zero global emissions and avert the worst impacts of climate change.
For experts like Charles Harvey, a professor of carbon capture and storage at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this shows that the huge amounts of taxpayer money being poured into the technology under the guise of reducing global emissions are actually reinforcing the fossil fuels at the root of the climate crisis.
“When you subsidize this, you’re shifting the playing field away from technologies that don’t emit carbon in the first place, really low-carbon energy sources like wind and solar,” he told DeSmog. “And that opens up the market for oil.”
